Home is where the heart is, even the frozen north

With the dark season upon us, is it any wonder that we escape so often in our dreams?

After three weeks of punishing sub-zero temperatures, many of us long to be anywhere south of where we are right now, which seems to be the coldest place on the planet.

It’s a natural reaction to what we are forced to endure. We wrap up like mummies and wince as the relentless arctic air assaults our lungs and freezes our nostrils shut. We grow tired of having to wear bulky sweaters in our houses, of retreating like hermits from the frequent lashings of snow and ice. The scraping of windshields, the feeble whir of dying car batteries, and the constant chug of furnaces become the soundtrack of our compressed winter lives.

Desperate for light and warmth, we tell ourselves there must be more to winter in Maine than surviving until spring and battling the blues along the way.

Patricia Bowen is wrestling with a melancholy of her own right now, but it’s not the seasonal variety. Sitting in her apartment in Bangor, surrounded by boxes stuffed with her belongings, she says she is preparing to leave this frozen land for the soft breezes of Virginia Beach, where she grew up.

The thought depresses her for reasons that heat-seeking Mainers might not understand. Bowen isn’t sure she fully understands it, either, not even after 40 years of contemplation. But one thing is certain: she would do anything to stay in Maine forever.

“There’s just something about New England that is difficult to put into words,” she says as the bitter winds blow and the mercury hovers at zero. “I’ve only been here a few months, but it is definitely home to me. It’s the home I’ve dreamed of all my life.”

Bowen grew up in the east Virginia region known as Tidewater. The beaches were long and flat, the weather mild in winter and hot in summer. To vacationers from the icy North, its white sands and blue water were Paradise itself. Every year, as they escaped to her part of the world, Bowen yearned to escape to theirs.

“Something instinctive always told me my happiness lay waiting there,” Bowen wrote recently in an essay about her brief stay in Maine.

Her longing for New England, a place she’d never seen, nearly became an obsession in her youth. She read everything she could find about the region. While watching a movie that was set in New England, she wondered why the female star would leave so beautiful a place for New York City. When the character came home at the end, Bowen knew she’d found a soulmate.

Later, she fueled her passion through the Yankee sentiments of writers such as Robert Frost. When he spoke of hardiness, independence, and regional identity, she recognized those values as her own. Her roots might have been Southern, but her heart resided in the North.

In January of 1991, while studying literature as a graduate student at Old Dominion University, she decided it was time to finally see this place called New England. She chose Maine, which promised all the snow and cold she could want. As the airplane rolled down the snow-covered runway in Bangor, she knew she was home at last.

“This was the homecoming I had fantasized and dreamed about all my life,” she wrote.

She rented a car and drove north, through Houlton, Monticello, Mars Hill, Presque Isle and Caribou. Riding through the icy landscape, she vowed to return one day and never leave. Two days later, she took a bus to Boston and then a train to Virginia.

“I cried most of the way,” she wrote.

Last May, Bowen packed a U-Haul and came to Maine to start a new life. To her family in Virginia, she was leaving home. To Bowen, she was coming home.

Her plan was to find a secretarial job, preferably in Bangor. When she had saved enough money, she would move to a small town like Orono or Houlton and eventually make a living as a writer. After a fruitless search for work in a poor economy, however, Bowen’s dwindling finances finally forced her to give up and go back to Virginia.

In her sadness, even mundane details such as canceling her telephone and electricity service made her feel as if she were planning a funeral.

“Some people express envy when I give them the forwarding address of Virginia Beach,” she wrote in her goodbye essay to Maine. “They say they would like to be going where it is warmer. They do not not know that I would give anything to trade places with them, to be able to stay here.”

This week, as she prepares to leave Maine and her dream behind, she hopes for a last-minute miracle that will allow her to stay. She knows that the Megabucks tickets she bought won’t deliver it, though, and her prayers won’t pay the rent. So she’ll go, carrying memories of a life that others take for granted.

“Oh, I do envy people who were born in this state,” she said. “They are so lucky. I know that people always think the grass is greener somewhere else, and it usually isn’t. But I think the grass truly is greener here. I can’t explain it, but I feel like I belong.”